Wednesday, September 25, 2013

MSP to YUL

My son Jon and I are about to fly to Montreal.... Neither of us have been there before.  Renting an apartment there for a week, will get to know the city well!

 
 
Look out, Canada, here we come....

 

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

i love two things

"I love two things.  I love you, and I love the opera."  -- Ronny Cammareri (played by Nicholas Cage) in the movie Moonstruck.
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Personally, I love the Puccini and Verdi Italian operas.

Tonight we're going to the Minnesota Opera's production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut.  Giacomo Puccini also wrote the music for La boheme, Madame Butterfly, Turandot and other great operas.

Manon Lescaut, which premiered in Turin, Italy in 1893, is one I haven't seen before and am of course looking forward to it.
 
 
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My son Jon and I leave tomorrow for a week in Montreal and Quebec City.  Parlez-vous français, dudes?

Monday, September 23, 2013

rediscovered aunts and uncles


Currently on the Thrust Stage at the Guthrie Theater is the Anton Chekhov classic, Uncle Vanya, first performed in Moscow in 1899 but still thoroughly enjoyable here in Minneapolis in 2013, with remarkable characters that are real, sometimes funny but ultimately kind of miserable.  See it if you are local and get the chance.  It's there until late October.

Besides seeing Uncle Vanya this past week, I also got to see How to be a Korean Woman, a one-woman performance by actress Sun Mee Chomet, based on her own story of growing up in the U.S. as a Korean adoptee and then as an adult going to Korea in an attempt to find her birth family.  This show is up in the Guthrie's Dowling Theater, is just there briefly (ending tomorrow) and is entertaining, funny and sad.  In her story, she does ultimately, after much frustration and determination, find her mother, aunts and grandmother and learned from them, well, how to be a Korean woman, which might not be at all what you would expect!

Thanks, Guthrie, for providing such quality and variety.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

delta's health care options

Michael, a friend (actually, more like a friend of a friend), and his wife were coming back from London the other day on a Delta flight, sitting in coach seats.  At some point, there was an "Is there a doctor on this flight?" announcement.  Michael's wife is a physician, so she responded.

There was a passenger in Business Class having a heart attack or something.  Michael's wife was gone from his seat for an hour and a half, trying to revive the man.  When she went back to her seat, she told Michael that the man didn't make it, he had died.

Shortly after that, a flight attendant came to them and said thanks for helping, we could move you up to Business Class if you like.  Michael:  "No thanks, there's a dead guy up there!"  So this is what the flight attendant offered them instead:  a $50 voucher on their next Delta flight!

What??  That's it??  Might it have been something bigger if the guy had lived??

Friday, September 20, 2013

what you didn't miss

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." -- Eleanor Roosevelt.
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A word of wisdom to the lapsed bloggers out there.  Who cares what your readers think when you probably don't have any anyway?  Write what you want, write it for yourself.  Experiment.  Go wild.  Take chances.  Or just post photos of your cocker spaniel.
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What you missed or, more likely, didn't miss since I woke up screaming:

--  Within the last month, I started to write emotional rants about the Syria thing, really angry stuff, but I found myself self-censoring because I apparently worried about how you, the unknown reader, would react.  You know I like Obama, for the most part, and you might get the wrong idea if I started comparing him to LBJ or george w. bush, two presidents who led us into destructive, unnecessary but corporate money-making wars based entirely on lies.  Plus I didn't know how sensitive you might be to over-use of the F word in describing my rage.  So I published nothing.  I need to take chances of offending you, the perhaps reader, sorry.
--  I started drinking Scotch, thanks in part to going on a binge watching 5 seasons of the amazing TV show Mad Men.  I'll have more to say about that (Both about Mad Men and Scotch).
--  To get a fresh start on working out, I dropped my membership at Lifetime Fitness and joined the YMCA.  For the past month and a half, I've been obsessed with getting back in shape, and I'm feeling great, and when I'm feeling good, my brain works better.... Let's see if it shows in my renewed blog ...

ET MAINTENANT 2.0